Comment by nerdy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdy | Hacker News Reader

But what does this tell us about introverts? Is the "pebble in the shoe" of an introvert an annoyance with the perceived carelessness on the part of the grammatical offender? Or maybe a lack of respect? Is introversion the cause, or a sibling to pedantry of a broader psychological trait?

I hated English classes in school, never paid attention. Skipped. Failed. It seemed inconsequential at the time. Gaining access to a BBS was a bit of a culture shock. Computers were fascinating but suddenly my peers cared about spelling, grammar... even punctuation (it happened to be a BBS for a local paper, maybe related). So at 15, I felt out of place and committed to thoroughly learning all of the things I'd skipped in school. Not because of snarky responses, corrections, or others’ expectations but because it impacted my ability to communicate - which I don't particularly enjoy but feel is important. Even now, I'm communicating... but it isn't for the sake of making noise or banging on a keyboard, it's about an idea. We communicate to share thoughts and without that mechanism we wouldn't have shared learning which resulted in anything commonly considered "technology" or "machines" today.

My visceral reaction to grammatical errors is the feeling that the person places less of a value on communicating ideas. It isn't about intelligence, it's about values.

Does anyone else feel this way? Am I just a pedantic, judgmental asshole?

>My visceral reaction to grammatical errors is the feeling that the person places less of a value

You have to go a layer above that and ponder if the person consciously analyzed whatever combination of letters+punctuation he/she wrote had a weighting for others to assign a "value."

For example, you used the word "impacted". Some stylists are annoyed that the noun "impact" has been verb-ified into "impacted" when there was already a perfectly good word like "affected". However, others don't mind it and it is already widely used in serious business writing and academic research papers. (Many PowerPoint slides have the word "impacted".) The point is you don't sit down and weigh how others judge you for using "impacted". It just came out naturally from your brain, to your hands typing it, and that's what we see. You didn't intend for that word to act as a speed bump for others to judge you. Thankfully, most of us don't care about it.

Also btw, you have "comma splices" in your post.[1] Again, I think it's better that most HN readers are forgiving of grammatical mistakes because I don't think most of us would want to see endless meta tangent posts pointing out and correcting everyone's errors.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Some stylists are annoyed that the noun "impact" has been verb-ified into "impacted" because it's most widely used in business writing and PowerPoint slides...

> The point is you don't sit down and weigh how others judge you for using "impacted".

I do now! :)

When correcting students on the use of 'impacted,' my high school English teacher would say, "Feces are impacted; you are affected." For the rest of my life, seeing the word 'impacted' will always recall that visceral mental image.

I find such errors are like bum notes in a guitar solo. They're just wrong. A sign of incompetence, and I don't want that incompetence rubbing off on me, nor do I want to experience other areas of potential incompetence. The errors are warnings. The job was to install a bath. You've installed a toilet. You were painting the sky, but you've painted it green, unintentionally. Most of these things should be drilled into us by now that we shouldn't be having to think about them. I know I make mistakes and would welcome every correction, but no one corrects because correct is not a goal. Unknown unknowns. Some errors are more acceptable than others. The "tea's and coffee's" example in the article is embarrassing to me, comma splices often slip my notice. I'm reminded of the tolerance thresholds regarding dirty dishes in the sink. Some people happily walk past while others, unable to bear them, end up doing the washing time and again.

Does this mean introverts prefer the consistency of opinionated frameworks and languages? Is Go preferred by introverts, Scala by extraverts?

BTW, I had never heard of the "comma splice" rule before (but I'm not a native English speaker). It looks more like a stylistic rule than a grammar rule, and I can see nothing inherently wrong in using the form - the Wikipedia entry says it's considered acceptable or even compulsory in other languages. As a stylistic rule, it sounds like a particularly silly one, given that there are numerous examples of authors using comma splices in literature.

The Wikipedia entry mentions "The Elements of Style" by White and Strunk as one of the sources of the rule. The manual has been criticised by professional linguists, who noted that White and Strunk didn't even seem to understand what constitutes a passive voice (while discouraging their use). The manual also contains other silly prescriptions, like avoiding split infinitives.

While these criticisms are valid, you shouldn't use them to dismiss S&W entirely. It contains many good observations[1] about the English language.

[1] Sadly, many are voiced prescriptively despite the fact that neither S&W nor any other manual of style can claim to be the final arbiter of our ever-evolving language.

>The "tea's and coffee's" example in the article is embarrassing to me, comma splices often slip my notice.

Very funny. Was this intentional?

>My visceral reaction to grammatical errors is the feeling that the person places less of a value on communicating ideas. It isn't about intelligence, it's about values.

I don't see what the usual "grammar pedant" complaints have to do with valuing communication. I typically see people complain about things like using "there" instead of "their", "its" instead of "it's", "affect" instead of "effect". As a rule, none of these things have any impact on the ability of a reader to understand the writer's intended message. I realize that in some rare cases these mistakes create ambiguity, but that's never the grammar pedant's complaint.

> none of these things have any impact on the ability of a reader to understand the writer's intended message

I disagree, I've encountered several instances in corporate communications where the use of then instead of than has completely changed the meaning of a message.

Imagine writing a compiler that spent much of its parsing time trying to infer what the programmer meant, instead of enforcing a syntax and getting-on with the task of translating to machine code. It would be an enormous behemoth that would take much longer to do its job than necessary.

Yet, strangely, those programmers who don't care much about grammar seem quite happy to adhere to arbitrary programming language syntax. Why is that? Why don't they force compilers to just accept their possibly-incorrect inputs with the excuse 'you knew what I meant'?

I agree with you. I am seriously annoyed by the kind of mistakes you've listed, and it has nothing to do with the message being understandable or not. Instead, it means to me that the writer (often a native English speaker) has never bothered to master even the most basic rules of his own language, which in turn suggests a pretty poor education, at least as far as reading and writing skills go. Also, since he has never noticed his mistakes, he's either poorly literate, or displays a remarkable lack of curiosity and observation abilities.

On the other hand, I'm Italian. I came to understand, after a few years living in an English speaking country, that the emphasis Italians put on writing correctly (as well as on many other things - e.g. eating well, dressing decently, avoiding public drunkenness) has no correspondence in the English speaking world.

Did I annoy you enough? :)

English-speaking countries are not all alike. The level of non-English speaking immigration to a country (which happens in all English-speaking countries, but to a much greater degree in some than others) has a large impact on the ability to maintain high standards for the language.

As I'm sure you know, English spelling is also much less phonetically obvious than Italian (and I would not be surprised to learn that English is slightly grammatically more complicated than Italian, although frankly, as far as I'm concerned, any language with grammatical gender wins for difficulty), so emphasizing correct writing might be slightly harder.

I don't think it's a matter of immigration, I am living in a country with a relatively recent immigration and a lot of natives are making horrendous mistakes (usual suspects: "there" for "their", "who's" for "whose", "definatly" for "definitely", etc.).

You second point is absolutely correct: English spelling is a nightmare especially if you don't have any alternative phonetic system in which to represent it. My Italian wiring makes "there" and "their" two completely different words (they would be pronounced differently if read phonetically in Italian: "ther-a" and "the-eer") - English speakers don't have the luxury of a discriminating phonetical representation. By the way, this whole thread is about "grammar pedants" - but in fact we're just talking about spelling. The construction of the sentences is very rarely wrong.

I tend to find it easier to hold a discussion with those that say what they mean. I personally have found the type of person that says "You know what I mean." in response to corrections of the "they're/their/there" sort to be intellectually lazy in many of their endeavors (and in support of the one of the article's premises, typically "outgoing" as well).

The type of person that sprinkles their text with whatever word seems appropriate enough and leaves you to figure out what they truly mean is offloading their cognitive work onto you, to the detriment of communication and understanding.

They don't impact the ability of the reader to eventually understand the message, but they do decrease the speed at which you can do so if you read any faster than purely phonetically. When your reading begins to involve visual pattern recognition at the word level as well as some degree of pattern recognition of higher-level structures, an error like that is an annoying distraction.

For writing where more time is spent reading it than typing it, it indicates inconsiderateness not to apply the necessary amount of spelling and grammar checking if the writer is unable to produce well-formed writing without specifically attending to its well-formedness. (Although it could also be a status signal to be able to make errors.)

(It's the same reason for code formatting and style rules - they standardize the low level details so readers can focus on the higher-level meaning.)

Any native English speaker who reads much at all (not to mention writes!) and has above a certain level of innate linguistic intelligence will also automatically develop perfect grammar and perfect or near-perfect spelling, so making frequent errors also indicates a certain semi-literacy.

> Does anyone else feel this way? Am I just a pedantic, judgmental asshole?

It depends. Now that you have gone from an intelligence problem to a value problem: do you believe these people are worth less because you believe yourself we choose our values and inherit our intelligence ? Do you despise them even more so now that it's a value question and not an intelligence one ?

Or are they not intelligent enough to pick up the adequate values ?

It also depends on how you pick up on the less grammatically versed or bully them into shame when pointing out their mistakes. Do you do that ?

More importantly: s our grasp of grammar strong enough to make up for the perceived deficiencies of the other interlocutors ?

> do you believe these people are worth less because you believe yourself we choose our values and inherit our intelligence ?

No, but I would probably be less inclined to want them as a housemate (RE: the article). The premise is that the e-mail is all you have to go on, so while it's definitely reading into the details it'd almost certainly be a consideration.

For example, if someone places a low value on communication then it would likely be more difficult to come to reasonable mutual understandings about household protocols (chores/cleaning, respectful practices, etc).

> Do you despise them even more so now that it's a value question and not an intelligence one ?

I wouldn't say I despise (or even dislike) them at all, we'd simply be unlikely best friends.

> Or are they not intelligent enough to pick up the adequate values ?

No

> It also depends on how you pick up on the less grammatically versed or bully them into shame when pointing out their mistakes. Do you do that ?

No

> More importantly: s our grasp of grammar strong enough to make up for the perceived deficiencies of the other interlocutors ?

Even if it is, it can be a terrible experience where one side is doing an incredible amount of work compared to the other. Incorrect homophones can be very difficult and when you combine them with spelling errors and other errata, it's often as bad as a garden path sentence because the message can be legitimate but have changed meaning. Just omit commas for some fun: "Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog"

Usually, people don't feel the same way when thinking about any kind of work; you have to master the basics if you want express something. You need to learn to draw before you can get to the point of expressing yourself via paintings. You need to learn architecture before doing buildings, learn to code to do programs. Yet only the most extreme cases of idiots claim that learning the means of expression stifles expression. Why? I think it boils down to the lack of hard metrics and the link with social issues (the old orwellian fight between classes through language).

I'd say that you're not the only one thinking this way, but some would disagree because that makes you an "uncle tom".

well nevr git lexical nirvana wo brakeing rulez

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